Hacker News Reader

Comment by 77pt77 | Hacker News Reader

>For instance, why not offer convicted pedophiles jobs which involve screening out child porn? That would save an innocent person from the trauma involved and it might even allow the pedophile to feel like he was redeeming himself to some degree by saving others from viewing that material.

Or just allow the pedophile to indulge in his paraphilia. I'm really not comfortable with this...

View on HN

At some point it will be possible to create very realistic CP without using children. Actually it might already be possible to do that. One would have thought that would solve most of the problem: create "artificial" CP with strict controls to ensure children are not involved, and let the weirdos watch as much as they want. (Admittedly, there would still probably be some super-weirdos who would be totally turned off by seeing the "Attestation of No Children Involved" message at the beginning of their CP...)

But this comment seems to imply that there would be a problem with that? What is the harm in movies that harm no one?

Because it normalizes that behavior, and may push some to act it out in real life.

I'd be curious to know of that's true. Japan has it everywhere and by everywhere I mean porn manga in every convenience store in the country of which about 3% depicts acts with children. Does Japan have a higher rate of real incidents? I have no idea. If we take violent media normalizes violence afaik we find the opposite. Violent media is up, actual violence is down.

Is this different from other forms of violence ? For example I have been shooting enemies in videogames for more than 20 years, yet I don't feel the urge to shoot anybody in real life.

This would effectively make child pornography "normal" (at least as normal as other extreme fetishes). Many people fear that that would lead to more pedophiles acting on their urges. Then again some think that readily available child porn could reduce cravings and reduce child molestation. I'm not sure if any actual studies exist that shed some light on that problem

Studies are all fairly conclusive: indulging in watching porn related to your paraphilia makes you want to act on that paraphilia. Suggesting otherwise is completely absurd.

Would you care to point us to these studies?

A cursory google about the catharsis myth should do the trick. Not terribly invested in convincing you.

That's fine; you haven't. Googling "catharsis myth" turns up various (unscientific, opinionated) stuff about anger. Perhaps some CP fans are motivated by anger (toward children?), but to generalize from that to all the other motivations for CP is a non sequitur. I'm not normally the "citation needed" dickhead, but you started out by specifically claiming "studies are all fairly conclusive", which seemed like a unique situation for psychiatry so I thought maybe I could learn something...

Freud being wrong about something only tangentially related (what are the chances?) isn't a valid justification for prior restraint. If the work in question hasn't been shown to harm, there would be very little reason to censor it in USA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com